Charles Dickens 25 page neatness of a placid boxer, took off that girdle or cestus as
before, and laid it on the table. Taking the table to repre-
Great Expectations
sent the path of virtue, I am justified in stating that during
the whole time of the Aged’s reading, Wemmick’s arm was
straying from the path of virtue and being recalled to it by
Miss Skiffins.
At last, the Aged read himself into a light slumber. This
was the time for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a tray
of glasses, and a black bottle with a porcelain-topped cork,
representing some clerical dignitary of a rubicund and
social aspect. With the aid of these appliances we all had
something warm to drink: including the Aged, who was
soon awake again. Miss Skiffins mixed, and I observed that
she and Wemmick drank out of one glass. Of course I knew
better than to offer to see Miss Skiffins home, and under the
circumstances I thought I had best go first: which I did, tak-
ing a cordial leave of the Aged, and having passed a pleasant
evening.
Before a week was out, I received a note from Wemmick,
dated Walworth, stating that he hoped he had made some
advance in that matter appertaining to our private and per-
sonal capacities, and that he would be glad if I could come
and see him again upon it. So, I went out to Walworth again,
and yet again, and yet again, and I saw him by appointment
in the City several times, but never held any communica-
tion with him on the subject in or near Little Britain. The
upshot was, that we found a worthy young merchant or ship-
ping-broker, not long established in business, who wanted
intelligent help, and who wanted capital, and who in due
course of time and receipt would want a partner. Between
him and me, secret articles were signed of which Herbert
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was the subject, and I paid him half of my five hundred
pounds down, and engaged for sundry other payments:
some, to fall due at certain dates out of my income: some,
contingent on my coming into my property. Miss Skiffins’s
brother conducted the negotiation. Wemmick pervaded it
throughout, but never appeared in it.
The whole business was so cleverly managed, that Her-
bert had not the least suspicion of my hand being in it. I
never shall forget the radiant face with which he came home
one afternoon, and told me, as a mighty piece of news, of his
having fallen in with one Clarriker (the young merchant’s
name), and of Clarriker’s having shown an extraordinary
inclination towards him, and of his belief that the open-
ing had come at last. Day by day as his hopes grew stronger
and his face brighter, he must have thought me a more and
more affectionate friend, for I had the greatest difficulty in
restraining my tears of triumph when I saw him so happy.
At length, the thing being done, and he having that day en-
tered Clarriker’s House, and he having talked to me for a
whole evening in a flush of pleasure and success, I did really
cry in good earnest when I went to bed, to think that my ex-
pectations had done some good to somebody.
A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now
opens on my view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and
before I pass on to all the changes it involved, I must give
one chapter to Estella. It is not much to give to the theme
that so long filled my heart.
Great Expectations
Chapter 38
If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should
ever come to be haunted when I am dead, it will be haunt-
ed, surely, by my ghost. O the many, many nights and days
through which the unquiet spirit within me haunted that
house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it
would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wan-
dering, about that house.
The lady with whom Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley by
name, was a widow, with one daughter several years older
than Estella. The mother looked young, and the daugh-
ter looked old; the mother’s complexion was pink, and the
daughter’s was yellow; the mother set up for frivolity, and
the daughter for theology. They were in what is called a
good position, and visited, and were visited by, numbers
of people. Little, if any, community of feeling subsisted
between them and Estella, but the understanding was es-
tablished that they were necessary to her, and that she was
necessary to them. Mrs. Brandley had been a friend of Miss
Havisham’s before the time of her seclusion.
In Mrs. Brandley’s house and out of Mrs. Brandley’s
house, I suffered every kind and degree of torture that Es-
tella could cause me. The nature of my relations with her,
which placed me on terms of familiarity without placing
me on terms of favour, conduced to my distraction. She
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made use of me to tease other admirers, and she turned the
very familiarity between herself and me, to the account of
putting a constant slight on my devotion to her. If I had
been her secretary, steward, half-brother, poor relation - if
I had been a younger brother of her appointed husband - I
could not have seemed to myself, further from my hopes
when I was nearest to her. The privilege of calling her by
her name and hearing her call me by mine, became under
the circumstances an aggravation of my trials; and while I
think it likely that it almost maddened her other lovers, I
know too certainly that it almost maddened me.
She had admirers without end. No doubt my jealousy
made an admirer of every one who went near her; but there
were more than enough of them without that.
I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often in town,
and I used often to take her and the Brandleys on the wa-
ter; there were picnics, fete days, plays, operas, concerts,
parties, all sorts of pleasures, through which I pursued her
- and they were all miseries to me. I never had one hour’s
happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the
four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of
having her with me unto death.
Throughout this part of our intercourse - and it lasted, as
will presently be seen, for what I then thought a long time
- she habitually reverted to that tone which expressed that
our association was forced upon us. There were other times
when she would come to a sudden check in this tone and in
all her many tones, and would seem to pity me.
‘Pip, Pip,’ she said one evening, coming to such a check,
Great Expectations
when we sat apart at a darkening window of the house in
Richmond; ‘will you never take warning?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of me.’
‘Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Es-
tella?’
‘Do I mean! If you don’t know what I mean, you are
blind.’
I should have replied that Love was commonly reputed
blind, but for the reason that I always was restrained - and
this was not the least of my miseries - by a feeling that it was
ungenerous to press myself upon her, when she knew that
she could not choose but obey Miss Havisham. My dread
always was, that this knowledge on her part laid me under
a heavy disadvantage with her pride, and made me the sub-
ject of a rebellious struggle in her bosom.
‘At any rate,’ said I, ‘I have no warning given me just now,
for you wrote to me to come to you, this time.’
‘That’s true,’ said Estella, with a cold careless smile that
always chilled me.
After looking at the twilight without, for a little while,
she went on to say:
‘The time has come round when Miss Havisham wishes
to have me for a day at Satis. You are to take me there, and
bring me back, if you will. She would rather I did not travel
alone, and objects to receiving my maid, for she has a sensi-
tive horror of being talked of by such people. Can you take
me?’
‘Can I take you, Estella!’
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‘You can then? The day after to-morrow, if you please.
You are to pay all charges out of my purse, You hear the
condition of your going?’
‘And must obey,’ said I.
This was all the preparation I received for that visit, or for
others like it: Miss Havisham never wrote to me, nor had I
ever so much as seen her handwriting. We went down on
the next day but one, and we found her in the room where I
had first beheld her, and it is needless to add that there was
no change in Satis House.
She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she
had been when I last saw them together; I repeat the word
advisedly, for there was something positively dreadful in
the energy of her looks and embraces. She hung upon Estel-
la’s beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her gestures,
and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she
looked at her, as though she were devouring the beautiful
creature she had reared.
From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance
that seemed to pry into my heart and probe its wounds.
‘How does she use you, Pip; how does she use you?’ she asked
me again, with her witch-like eagerness, even in Estella’s
hearing. But, when we sat by her flickering fire at night,
she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella’s hand drawn
through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extort-
ed from her, by dint of referring back to what Estella had
told her in her regular letters, the names and conditions of
the men whom she had fascinated; and as Miss Havisham
dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind mortally
Great Expectations
hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring
at me, a very spectre.
I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter
the sense of dependence and even of degradation that it
awakened - I saw in this, that Estella was set to wreak Miss
Havisham’s revenge on men, and that she was not to be giv-
en to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw in this,
a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending
her out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Hav-
isham sent her with the malicious assurance that she was
beyond the reach of all admirers, and that all who staked
upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in this, that I, too,
was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while the
prize was reserved for me. I saw in this, the reason for my
being staved off so long, and the reason for my late guard-
ian’s declining to commit himself to the formal knowledge
of such a scheme. In a word, I saw in this, Miss Havisham as
I had her then and there before my eyes, and always had had
her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct shadow
of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was
hidden from the sun.
The candles that lighted that room of hers were placed in
sconces on the wall. They were high from the ground, and
they burnt with the steady dulness of artificial light in air
that is seldom renewed. As I looked round at them, and at
the pale gloom they made, and at the stopped clock, and at
the withered articles of bridal dress upon the table and the
ground, and at her own awful figure with its ghostly reflec-
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tion thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling and the wall, I
saw in everything the construction that my mind had come
to, repeated and thrown back to me. My thoughts passed
into the great room across the landing where the table was
spread, and I saw it written, as it were, in the falls of the cob-
webs from the centre-piece, in the crawlings of the spiders
on the cloth, in the tracks of the mice as they betook their
little quickened hearts behind the panels, and in the grop-
ings and pausings of the beetles on the floor.
It happened on the occasion of this visit that some sharp
words arose between Estella and Miss Havisham. It was the
first time I had ever seen them opposed.
We were seated by the fire, as just now described, and
Miss Havisham still had Estella’s arm drawn through her
own, and still clutched Estella’s hand in hers, when Estella
gradually began to detach herself. She had shown a proud
impatience more than once before, and had rather endured
that fierce affection than accepted or returned it.
‘What!’ said Miss Havisham, flashing her eyes upon her,
‘are you tired of me?’
‘Only a little tired of myself,’ replied Estella, disengaging
her arm, and moving to the great chimney-piece, where she
stood looking down at the fire.
‘Speak the truth, you ingrate!’ cried Miss Havisham, pas-
sionately striking her stick upon the floor; ‘you are tired of
me.’Estella looked at her with perfect composure, and again
looked down at the fire. Her graceful figure and her beauti-
ful face expressed a self-possessed indifference to the wild
Great Expectations
heat of the other, that was almost cruel.
‘You stock and stone!’ exclaimed Miss Havisham. ‘You
cold, cold heart!’
‘What?’ said Estella, preserving her attitude of indiffer-
ence as she leaned against the great chimney-piece and only
moving her eyes; ‘do you reproach me for being cold? You?’
‘Are you not?’ was the fierce retort.
‘You should know,’ said Estella. ‘I am what you have
made me. Take all the praise, take all the blame; take all the
success, take all the failure; in short, take me.’
‘O, look at her, look at her!’ cried Miss Havisham, bitter-
ly; ‘Look at her, so hard and thankless, on the hearth where
she was reared! Where I took her into this wretched breast
when it was first bleeding from its stabs, and where I have
lavished years of tenderness upon her!’
‘At least I was no party to the compact,’ said Estella, ‘for
if I could walk and speak, when it was made, it was as much
as I could do. But what would you have? You have been very
good to me, and I owe everything to you. What would you
have?’
‘Love,’ replied the other.
‘You have it.’
‘I have not,’ said Miss Havisham.
‘Mother by adoption,’ retorted Estella, never departing
from the easy grace of her attitude, never raising her voice
as the other did, never yielding either to anger or tender-
ness, ‘Mother by adoption, I have said that I owe everything
to you. All I possess is freely yours. All that you have given
me, is at your command to have again. Beyond that, I have
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nothing. And if you ask me to give you what you never gave
me, my gratitude and duty cannot do impossibilities.’
‘Did I never give her love!’ cried Miss Havisham, turning
wildly to me. ‘Did I never give her a burning love, insepa-
rable from jealousy at all times, and from sharp pain, while
she speaks thus to me! Let her call me mad, let her call me
mad!’
‘Why should I call you mad,’ returned Estella, ‘I, of all
people? Does any one live, who knows what set purposes
you have, half as well as I do? Does any one live, who knows
what a steady memory you have, half as well as I do? I who
have sat on this same hearth on the little stool that is even
now beside you there, learning your lessons and looking up
into your face, when your face was strange and frightened
me!’
‘Soon forgotten!’ moaned Miss Havisham. ‘Times soon
forgotten!’
‘No, not forgotten,’ retorted Estella. ‘Not forgotten, but
treasured up in my memory. When have you found me false
to your teaching? When have you found me unmindful of
your lessons? When have you found me giving admission
here,’ she touched her bosom with her hand, ‘to anything
that you excluded? Be just to me.’
‘So proud, so proud!’ moaned Miss Havisham, pushing
away her grey hair with both her hands.
‘Who taught me to be proud?’ returned Estella. ‘Who
praised me when I learnt my lesson?’
‘So hard, so hard!’ moaned Miss Havisham, with her for-
mer action.
Great Expectations
‘Who taught me to be hard?’ returned Estella. ‘Who
praised me when I learnt my lesson?’
‘But to be proud and hard to me!’ Miss Havisham quite
shrieked, as she stretched out her arms. ‘Estella, Estella, Es-
tella, to be proud and hard to me!’
Estella looked at her for a moment with a kind of calm
wonder, but was not otherwise disturbed; when the mo-
ment was past, she looked down at the fire again.
‘I cannot think,’ said Estella, raising her eyes after a si-
lence ‘why you should be so unreasonable when I come
to see you after a separation. I have never forgotten your
wrongs and their causes. I have never been unfaithful to
you or your schooling. I have never shown any weakness
that I can charge myself with.’
‘Would it be weakness to return my love?’ exclaimed
Miss Havisham. ‘But yes, yes, she would call it so!’
‘I begin to think,’ said Estella, in a musing way, after an-
other moment of calm wonder, ‘that I almost understand
how this comes about. If you had brought up your adopted
daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms,
and had never let her know that there was such a thing as
the daylight by which she had never once seen your face - if
you had done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her
to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would
have been disappointed and angry?’
Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making
a low moaning, and swaying herself on her chair, but gave
no answer.
‘Or,’ said Estella, ‘ - which is a nearer case - if you had
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taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your
utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as
daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroy-
er, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted
you and would else blight her; - if you had done this, and
then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the
daylight and she could not do it, you would have been dis-
appointed and angry?’
Miss Havisham sat listening (or it seemed so, for I could
not see her face), but still made no answer.
‘So,’ said Estella, ‘I must be taken as I have been made.
The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two
together make me.’
Miss Havisham had settled down, I hardly knew how,
upon the floor, among the faded bridal relics with which it
was strewn. I took advantage of the moment - I had sought
one from the first - to leave the room, after beseeching Es-
tella’s attention to her, with a movement of my hand. When
I left, Estella was yet standing by the great chimney-piece,
just as she had stood throughout. Miss Havisham’s grey
hair was all adrift upon the ground, among the other bridal
wrecks, and was a miserable sight to see.
It was with a depressed heart that I walked in the star-
light for an hour and more, about the court-yard, and about
the brewery, and about the ruined garden. When I at last
took courage to return to the room, I found Estella sitting
at Miss Havisham’s knee, taking up some stitches in one
of those old articles of dress that were dropping to pieces,
and of which I have often been reminded since by the faded
Great Expectations
tatters of old banners that I have seen hanging up in cathe-
drals. Afterwards, Estella and I played at cards, as of yore
- only we were skilful now, and played French games - and
so the evening wore away, and I went to bed.
I lay in that separate building across the court-yard. It
was the first time I had ever lain down to rest in Satis House,
and sleep refused to come near me. A thousand Miss Hav-
ishams haunted me. She was on this side of my pillow, on
that, at the head of the bed, at the foot, behind the half-
opened door of the dressing-room, in the dressing-room,
in the room overhead, in the room beneath - everywhere.
At last, when the night was slow to creep on towards two
o’clock, I felt that I absolutely could no longer bear the place
as a place to lie down in, and that I must get up. I there-
fore got up and put on my clothes, and went out across the
yard into the long stone passage, designing to gain the outer
court-yard and walk there for the relief of my mind. But, I
was no sooner in the passage than I extinguished my can-
dle; for, I saw Miss Havisham going along it in a ghostly
manner, making a low cry. I followed her at a distance, and
saw her go up the staircase. She carried a bare candle in
her hand, which she had probably taken from one of the
sconces in her own room, and was a most unearthly object
by its light. Standing at the bottom of the staircase, I felt the
mildewed air of the feast-chamber, without seeing her open
the door, and I heard her walking there, and so across into
her own room, and so across again into that, never ceasing
the low cry. After a time, I tried in the dark both to get out,
and to go back, but I could do neither until some streaks of
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day strayed in and showed me where to lay my hands. Dur-
ing the whole interval, whenever I went to the bottom of the
staircase, I heard her footstep, saw her light pass above, and
heard her ceaseless low cry.
Before we left next day, there was no revival of the dif-
ference between her and Estella, nor was it ever revived on
any similar occasion; and there were four similar occasions,
to the best of my remembrance. Nor, did Miss Havisham’s
manner towards Estella in anywise change, except that I
believed it to have something like fear infused among its
former characteristics.
It is impossible to turn this leaf of my life, without put-
ting Bentley Drummle’s name upon it; or I would, very
gladly.
On a certain occasion when the Finches were assembled
in force, and when good feeling was being promoted in the
usual manner by nobody’s agreeing with anybody else, the
presiding Finch called the Grove to order, forasmuch as
Mr. Drummle had not yet toasted a lady; which, according
to the solemn constitution of the society, it was the brute’s
turn to do that day. I thought I saw him leer in an ugly way
at me while the decanters were going round, but as there
was no love lost between us, that might easily be. What was
my indignant surprise when he called upon the company to
pledge him to ‘Estella!’
‘Estella who?’ said I.
‘Never you mind,’ retorted Drummle.
‘Estella of where?’ said I. ‘You are bound to say of where.’
Which he was, as a Finch.
Great Expectations
‘Of Richmond, gentlemen,’ said Drummle, putting me
out of the question, ‘and a peerless beauty.’
Much he knew about peerless beauties, a mean miserable
idiot! I whispered Herbert.
‘I know that lady,’ said Herbert, across the table, when
the toast had been honoured.
‘Do you?’ said Drummle.
‘And so do I,’ I added, with a scarlet face.
‘Do you?’ said Drummle. ‘Oh, Lord!’
This was the only retort - except glass or crockery - that
the heavy creature was capable of making; but, I became
as highly incensed by it as if it had been barbed with wit,
and I immediately rose in my place and said that I could
not but regard it as being like the honourable Finch’s im-
pudence to come down to that Grove - we always talked
about coming down to that Grove, as a neat Parliamentary
turn of expression - down to that Grove, proposing a lady of
whom he knew nothing. Mr. Drummle upon this, starting
up, demanded what I meant by that? Whereupon, I made
him the extreme reply that I believed he knew where I was
to be found.
Whether it was possible in a Christian country to get
on without blood, after this, was a question on which the
Finches were divided. The debate upon it grew so lively, in-
deed, that at least six more honourable members told six
more, during the discussion, that they believed they knew
where they were to be found. However, it was decided at
last (the Grove being a Court of Honour) that if Mr. Drum-
mle would bring never so slight a certificate from the lady,
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importing that he had the honour of her acquaintance, Mr.
Pip must express his regret, as a gentleman and a Finch, for
‘having been betrayed into a warmth which.’ Next day was
appointed for the production (lest our honour should take
cold from delay), and next day Drummle appeared with a
polite little avowal in Estella’s hand, that she had had the
honour of dancing with him several times. This left me no
course but to regret that I had been ‘betrayed into a warmth
which,’ and on the whole to repudiate, as untenable, the
idea that I was to be found anywhere. Drummle and I then
sat snorting at one another for an hour, while the Grove
engaged in indiscriminate contradiction, and finally the
promotion of good feeling was declared to have gone ahead
at an amazing rate.
I tell this lightly, but it was no light thing to me. For, I
cannot adequately express what pain it gave me to think
that Estella should show any favour to a contemptible,
clumsy, sulky booby, so very far below the average. To the
present moment, I believe it to have been referable to some
pure fire of generosity and disinterestedness in my love for
her, that I could not endure the thought of her stooping to
that hound. No doubt I should have been miserable whom-
soever she had favoured; but a worthier object would have
caused me a different kind and degree of distress.
It was easy for me to find out, and I did soon find out,
that Drummle had begun to follow her closely, and that she
allowed him to do it. A little while, and he was always in
pursuit of her, and he and I crossed one another every day.
He held on, in a dull persistent way, and Estella held him
Great Expectations
on; now with encouragement, now with discouragement,
now almost flattering him, now openly despising him, now
knowing him very well, now scarcely remembering who he
was.The Spider, as Mr. Jaggers had called him, was used to
lying in wait, however, and had the patience of his tribe.
Added to that, he had a blockhead confidence in his mon-
ey and in his family greatness, which sometimes did him
good service - almost taking the place of concentration and
determined purpose. So, the Spider, doggedly watching Es-
tella, outwatched many brighter insects, and would often
uncoil himself and drop at the right nick of time.
At a certain Assembly Ball at Richmond (there used to
be Assembly Balls at most places then), where Estella had
outshone all other beauties, this blundering Drummle so
hung about her, and with so much toleration on her part,
that I resolved to speak to her concerning him. I took the
next opportunity: which was when she was waiting for Mrs.
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